In the past, internet-connected sports games relating to real sporting events focused on the “fantasy” of creating a group made up of individual players in each position who in the real world currently play for different franchises. In those games, the user or gamer typically selects a “team” of players from a pool of individual athletes currently playing in a league, e.g., National Football League, Major League Baseball, National Basketball Association, and National Hockey League. The gamer selects the fantasy team, as provided under the specific criteria of the particular sports game, for a particular period of time, such as one game, one week, or an entire season. The gamer's performance is judged by how well the individuals in the fantasy team performed during the period on their separate, individual teams in separate, different sporting events. More points or scores are awarded for good performances of the accumulated group of individuals added together, fewer points or lesser scores for less satisfactory performances. The accumulated points for the entire fantasy team is compared to the accumulated points of the fantasy teams of competing gamers. The gamer with the most points or highest scores among the competing gamers wins.
Fantasy team sports games have some disadvantages. For example, they do not reward a user or gamer for in-depth knowledge of a particular, possibly favorite team or subset of teams within a league or conference from which individual players are selected. Users and gamers are rewarded for knowing all the players on all the teams, and disadvantaged for greater depth of knowledge of some players, but only shallow or no knowledge of others.
A professional sports league may have thirty or more teams, and hundreds of active players. Many sports fans, however, focus their attention and conversations with peers, and therefore their knowledge, on their local or other favorite team, or on the particular division or conference of their local or other favorite team. Many fans focus their attention on learning and staying up-to-date on the details of how a team is trending, the status of a team's athletes' physical condition or injuries, how the team as a whole will perform under certain circumstances, or whether the team matches well or poorly against a particular opponent is very time consuming. Fantasy sports games do not recognize and reward those fans, or others who only have time and resources to focus on one team, or subset of teams within a professional or college sports league, conference or division.
Further, fantasy team sports do not adequately reward a user's or gamer's ability to predict real outcomes and occurrences of team performance in a single sporting event or throughout the course of a season. For example, a user could achieve a relatively high number of points by choosing a team made up of individual athletes that have unexpectedly good performances even when their teams performed poorly. A user could select a team make up of eleven football players who in a specific week performed better than expected. The user's fantasy team score would be relatively high despite the fact that perhaps all of their teams lost to their opponents. In other words, fantasy games do not adequately evaluate and reward a user's knowledge of a team or subset of a league or conference, or his or her ability to predict real world team outcomes or other real world aspects of the actual competitive sporting event (or series of events).